Irregular Past Tense
Practice high-frequency irregular past tense: ran, went, ate, saw, fell, made.
Session summary (SOAP)
Stays on this screen. Nothing is saved or sent.
Mark a card Correct, Correct with cue or Incorrect and the summary writes itself here.
How to run it
Group them by the kind of change. Drink to drank and sit to sat change the vowel; go to went is a completely different word; sleep to slept changes the vowel and adds a sound. Naming the groups is more useful than fourteen separate facts, even though the groups are rough. Then use them in a sentence with yesterday, which forces the past form. Ten minutes covers the fourteen.
Cueing ladder
Start at the top. Add support one step at a time.
- IndependentPresent the item and wait 5 seconds of quiet before helping.Log as correct
- HintStress the part of the sentence that changes, or point to the word ending.Log as cued
- Sentence starterSay the first half of the sentence and let the student finish it.Log as cued
- ModelSay the correct form in the whole sentence; the student repeats it.Log as cued
Adjust it
Give a sentence starter every time, and do fewer cards.
Ask for a new sentence of the student's own with the same form, with no card to lean on.
Matching IEP goal
Given sentence cards, Student will produce the target grammatical form in sentences in 8 of 10 opportunities across 3 consecutive sessions, given no more than an indirect cue.
Send it home through the parent portal →About this activity
Fourteen irregular verbs in both forms: run and ran, go and went, eat and ate, see and saw, fall and fell, make and made, take and took, give and gave, drink and drank, write and wrote, sleep and slept. All high frequency, which is why they are irregular — the commonest verbs resist regularisation, and they are also the ones a child needs first.
What to listen for
Listen for overregularisation. Goed, eated and runned are not errors of ignorance but of rule application — the child has the past tense rule and is applying it where English does not — and they are a developmentally positive sign. Watch for double marking, as in wented, which shows the same thing more clearly still.
Carrying it home
Recasting works better than correcting here. When a child says I goed, say oh, you went, and carry on — the correct form is heard in the right place and the conversation does not stop.
What's in this activity
- run → ran
- go → went
- eat → ate
- see → saw
- fall → fell
- make → made
- take → took
- give → gave
- come → came
- drink → drank
- sit → sat
- write → wrote
- find → found
- sleep → slept
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First through fourth, and older students learning English as an additional language.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all fourteen pairs play with no login.
- Is 'goed' a sign of a problem?
- Usually the opposite. It shows the child has worked out the past tense rule and is applying it to a verb that does not follow it, which is a normal and encouraging stage.
Use this board with your caseload
With a free account, every correct, cued and incorrect mark is saved to the student and scored against their IEP goal, with the data written up for you. Assign it as home practice through the parent portal.
Track progress freeFree for SLPs. No card, no trial clock.